Order a ham sandwich anywhere else and you get slices. Order chipped ham here and you get a pile of ham shaved so thin it looks like it might blow away, usually heated in barbecue sauce and stuffed into a bun.
The Isaly's connection
Chipped chopped ham is tied to Isaly's, the dairy and deli chain that spread across Western Pennsylvania and Ohio in the 20th century. Isaly's counters slicked their ham down to almost nothing on the slicer, sold it by the pound, and Pittsburgh families built entire dinners around it.
At its peak Isaly's was everywhere: a deli case, a dairy counter, and a place to get a cone after a Little League game. The chain faded, but chipped ham never went anywhere. You can still buy it at grocery stores around here, and plenty of corner delis will chip it fresh.
The Klondike thing
Isaly's also gets credit for the Klondike bar, the chocolate-coated ice cream square that eventually went national. Not bad for a regional dairy company.
How to eat it
There's a standard method, and it hasn't changed in decades:
- Dump a pound of chipped ham in a pan.
- Add barbecue sauce. Family recipes vary. Ketchup and brown sugar shows up a lot.
- Heat it until everything is sticky.
- Pile it on soft buns and serve with chips.
It's church basement food, fire hall food, and Sunday-after-the-game food. Nobody is calling it fancy.
The rest of the local menu
Chipped ham travels with a whole family of Pittsburgh foods that confuse outsiders. City chicken, which contains no chicken and never has. Jumbo, which is bologna. Halupki and pierogies, from the Central and Eastern European families who filled the mill towns. And fish sandwiches the size of a dinner plate every Friday in Lent.
Every one of them exists because people here fed big families on cheap cuts and made it taste good. That's the whole story of Pittsburgh food, and chipped ham is the clearest example.
What's your family's chipped ham recipe? We'll take all of them.